It's a sunny 5:30am in our hotel in Berlin, on the morning of our departure. For the past two days I have been unable to update the blog, as I couldn't seem to connect to the internet in our hotel in Prague, where we made a short detour.
So I'll start where I left off - at our last day in Poland, and our last hope of finding any more information on our ancestors.
That morning we headed out by bus to Jelenia Gora, where we were hoping to view some records in the archives of the district Hirschberg. There we encountered a very friendly and helpful lady (whose name slips my mind right now) who tried her best to find something for us, although she too pointed out that without a person's birth place, it is very difficult to impossible to find more information on them, especially if you're looking to find out who their parents were. She also tried to find the marriage certificate of my mother's grandfather and grandmother in Wernersdorf (for which we have the exact date, as seen on the picture I've used for the background of this blog) and allowed us to look through the actual marriage registries with her, but we couldn't find it, perhaps because we were looking at records for the wrong Wernersdorf (we tried two, but there were something like seven Wernersdorfs in Poland at the time!). She also said that she would probably be able to find something if she had more time, and gave me her email address to send her all of the information we have and are looking for, for her to do a longer search. So we'll definitely do that as soon as we get back to SA!
After that, we also visited the archives at Kowary (Schmiedeberg), hoping to find Johann Friederich's death certificate from 1914. Strangely we encountered the exact opposite attitude in Kowary than we did in Jelenia Gora - the people at the archive seemed unwilling to help, even slightly rude. While their records would have been only a fraction of that of the much larger Jelenia Gora, they wouldn't let us look at any of it, instead proposing we give them our postal address, for them to mail us Johann Friederich's death certificate. They wouldn't consider trying to find Josefine's, or their daughter Emma's marriage certificate, presumably not even if we paid them! What really blew my mind was when the woman asked if she should mail us the original or a copy of Johann Friederich's death certificate! Did they not care for these records from a time before they or any of their relatives lived there? What if someone else - a distant relative - was looking for my g. g. grandfather and they had sent off his original birth certificate to me - would they tell them he never existed?
We also asked them about what happened to the graves of the Germans that lived there before the war, expecting to hear that they were destroyed as I had read in my research, but instead the woman said that, since no taxes were paid for their upkeep, the gravestones were replaced and new bodies buried on top of them. Although I know this to be standard (yet heartless) practice in many cemeteries around the world, I find it very hard to believe that this is what happened here. Firstly, it goes against what I have read - that all German graves on the Polish side of the Riesengebirge were decimated directly after the war, and it doesn't explain the overgrown remnants of a graveyard with the remains of an old wall that we found directly in front of the present-day cemetery. Although I wanted to point this out to her, I decided to leave it, as I felt that it wouldn't get me very far.
The ordeal at the archives in Kowary left me feeling frustrated and defeated. All we wanted was to find the records for my g. g. grandparents so that we could trace our genealogy - instead it seemed it got us tangled up in politics and emotional baggage caused by a war that didn't even happen until 25 years after my g.g. grandfather's death! I couldn't help but notice that in all of the tourist information brochures of the area (with the possible exception of that of the Wang church) where its history is described, there is no mention of the former inhabitants and founders of these towns - they have literally been written out of history! Did my g. g. grandparents really deserve to have no trace left of their existence in the place they called home?
I guess there is no objectivity when it comes to history (or most other things for that matter). As an outsider, it is easy for me to say things should be told as they were, and the facts would speak for themselves. As a South African, I am all too aware of the historical and emotional baggage a nation can carry around with them. All of us are products of our environments, as much as we are products of our genes. While dates and places of origin can only put a person in the context of their milieu, perhaps the characteristics we share with our living relatives is a much better barometer of who our ancestors really were, and how they would have behaved given the particular environment they were faced with. In this case, especially with the lack of details we are faced with, perhaps the best answers have always been internal, rather than external.
Having visited the towns of the Riesengebirge - Buschvorwerk, Schmiedeberg, Krummhubel - where my g. g. grandparents chose to spend at least the last 20 or so years of their lives, makes me realise that there is definitely a bit of them in me. The few days we spent there were definitely the highlight of our trip, as we enjoyed the fresh mountain air and beautiful surroundings. In fact, this is where we learnt the most about them - even without the pieces of paper we set out trying to find at the start of our journey.
So I'll start where I left off - at our last day in Poland, and our last hope of finding any more information on our ancestors.
That morning we headed out by bus to Jelenia Gora, where we were hoping to view some records in the archives of the district Hirschberg. There we encountered a very friendly and helpful lady (whose name slips my mind right now) who tried her best to find something for us, although she too pointed out that without a person's birth place, it is very difficult to impossible to find more information on them, especially if you're looking to find out who their parents were. She also tried to find the marriage certificate of my mother's grandfather and grandmother in Wernersdorf (for which we have the exact date, as seen on the picture I've used for the background of this blog) and allowed us to look through the actual marriage registries with her, but we couldn't find it, perhaps because we were looking at records for the wrong Wernersdorf (we tried two, but there were something like seven Wernersdorfs in Poland at the time!). She also said that she would probably be able to find something if she had more time, and gave me her email address to send her all of the information we have and are looking for, for her to do a longer search. So we'll definitely do that as soon as we get back to SA!
After that, we also visited the archives at Kowary (Schmiedeberg), hoping to find Johann Friederich's death certificate from 1914. Strangely we encountered the exact opposite attitude in Kowary than we did in Jelenia Gora - the people at the archive seemed unwilling to help, even slightly rude. While their records would have been only a fraction of that of the much larger Jelenia Gora, they wouldn't let us look at any of it, instead proposing we give them our postal address, for them to mail us Johann Friederich's death certificate. They wouldn't consider trying to find Josefine's, or their daughter Emma's marriage certificate, presumably not even if we paid them! What really blew my mind was when the woman asked if she should mail us the original or a copy of Johann Friederich's death certificate! Did they not care for these records from a time before they or any of their relatives lived there? What if someone else - a distant relative - was looking for my g. g. grandfather and they had sent off his original birth certificate to me - would they tell them he never existed?
We also asked them about what happened to the graves of the Germans that lived there before the war, expecting to hear that they were destroyed as I had read in my research, but instead the woman said that, since no taxes were paid for their upkeep, the gravestones were replaced and new bodies buried on top of them. Although I know this to be standard (yet heartless) practice in many cemeteries around the world, I find it very hard to believe that this is what happened here. Firstly, it goes against what I have read - that all German graves on the Polish side of the Riesengebirge were decimated directly after the war, and it doesn't explain the overgrown remnants of a graveyard with the remains of an old wall that we found directly in front of the present-day cemetery. Although I wanted to point this out to her, I decided to leave it, as I felt that it wouldn't get me very far.
The ordeal at the archives in Kowary left me feeling frustrated and defeated. All we wanted was to find the records for my g. g. grandparents so that we could trace our genealogy - instead it seemed it got us tangled up in politics and emotional baggage caused by a war that didn't even happen until 25 years after my g.g. grandfather's death! I couldn't help but notice that in all of the tourist information brochures of the area (with the possible exception of that of the Wang church) where its history is described, there is no mention of the former inhabitants and founders of these towns - they have literally been written out of history! Did my g. g. grandparents really deserve to have no trace left of their existence in the place they called home?
I guess there is no objectivity when it comes to history (or most other things for that matter). As an outsider, it is easy for me to say things should be told as they were, and the facts would speak for themselves. As a South African, I am all too aware of the historical and emotional baggage a nation can carry around with them. All of us are products of our environments, as much as we are products of our genes. While dates and places of origin can only put a person in the context of their milieu, perhaps the characteristics we share with our living relatives is a much better barometer of who our ancestors really were, and how they would have behaved given the particular environment they were faced with. In this case, especially with the lack of details we are faced with, perhaps the best answers have always been internal, rather than external.
Having visited the towns of the Riesengebirge - Buschvorwerk, Schmiedeberg, Krummhubel - where my g. g. grandparents chose to spend at least the last 20 or so years of their lives, makes me realise that there is definitely a bit of them in me. The few days we spent there were definitely the highlight of our trip, as we enjoyed the fresh mountain air and beautiful surroundings. In fact, this is where we learnt the most about them - even without the pieces of paper we set out trying to find at the start of our journey.
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